The Joke: Part Eight

The show-trial and public execution of journalist Toby Young

Stains on the reputation

We have seen the way Young was attacked for his description of Oxford grammar school boys in The Oxford Myth (1988). To give the exact quote:

It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate … Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.

And to give Paul Mason’s tweet, once again, attacking him:

Toby@toadmeister Young despises working class kids who try to make good through education. that’s why the Tories have put him on a body responsible for regulating higher education.

One could point out that Young’s description of these “small, vaguely deformed undergraduates” had been written when he was 24 years old (Reader, think back to your 24-year-old self – and shudder).

There is also another point to be made – perhaps more pertinent - about young people and their literary heroes. Young’s piece had been written in the late 1980s, and therein may hang an explanation for its tone.

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Decades often seem defined by single writers, and in the 1980s the UK novelist in excelsis was unquestionably Martin Amis. If you wanted to be funny, if you wanted to write primarily to entertain, Amis in 1988 would have been your model.

His books – a comic universe – tend to look at humanity callously, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Amis is full of grotesque people and situations – tramps christened “mobile armpits” who “groan halitotically” and say “gob less” when they mean “God bless.” Older women (the anti-hero’s mother in The Rachel Papers) who look like “effeminate farm labourers” and whose buttocks “dance like punchballs” on the backs of their thighs. It’s all funny – if increasingly uncomfortable, as time goes by – largely because we don’t especially care about these characters, because they’re never fleshed out or quite human.

All young writers starting out tend to pastiche their heroes. Young, here, writing to amuse in 1987, had arguably written an Amis pastiche.

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But it wasn’t just Amis in the mix. The piece was about Oxford University, and when you thought of Oxford, the writer who would probably jump first into your head was Evelyn Waugh. Especially in this decade, following the staggering success of Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisited (TV company) in 1981. Indeed, Young had practically cited Waugh in his piece, saying he’d expected Oxford to contain “the sound of English country families baying for broken glass” - a line quoted verbatim from Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall (1928).

Take, for instance, Waugh’s description of a Welsh male voice choir from the same novel, and its influence on Young’s piece becomes clear:

Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and mouthing over their companions” shoulders.

Young, no more immune to time or fashion than the rest of us, was writing – a 24 year-old – in the mode of the day. Like so many young people picking up a pen before developing their own voice, he perhaps wasn’t asking “What do I think?” but “But what would my literary heroes make of this?” The extract regarding the working-class students arguably told us very little about Young’s real outlook. What it did tell us a lot about were the literary fashions of the day. Fashions which – it must be pointed out – went largely unquestioned in 1987.

“Knockers, breasts, boobs, baps”

We have also seen Young’s tweets on women’s breasts, the reaction that came in response to them: “Horrendous,” “disgusting”, “obnoxious”, “repellent” – and their trending with the hashtag #MeToo attached to them. But what was the wider context for these?

The decade in which Young came to prominence was the 1990s, and one must remember the atmosphere of that time. It was the era of new laddishness, of Men Behaving Badly and man-zines edited by people like Leeds-born “Citizen Cocaine” James Brown, with headlines like “Superlads”, “Scorchio” (below a picture of a woman in a basque) and “Girls, Goals and Go On My Son”. It was a decade of naughty men and saucy women in which Loaded’s cover of Frank Skinner winking cheekily out at us seemed to sum up the zeitgeist. All this was ironic, and yet not: the Sun’s page 3 still existed, and there was little reason to think it wouldn’t do so forever.

The spectre of AIDS had faded a bit and the entire world seemed to be obsessed with sex. Not to have a burgeoning love-life was to feel yourself an outcast, barely human. Workplaces were often hives of sexual expression and sometimes felt like extensions of school or university. At its worst, it could be oppressive, sexist and over-boisterous, particularly for those who felt excluded from the alpha group. But it could also, undeniably, be fun, and turning up to work each day rather like going to a party. For most, office banter – whatever is said now - was one of the things that made the working day tolerable. It was a game of verbal tennis which, played well, saw the ball moving faster and faster and demanding ever more skill to keep the rally going. Unlike tennis, it could also build teams as well.  

Were people happier then? It is difficult to say. Certainly they had to keep as much of their true selves hidden as – inevitably – they do now. Just very different parts of themselves, it must be said.

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Young’s comment – “Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse” – had been put forward by critics as an “apology for anal rape”. Nobody, amidst this, had pointed out how very difficult it would be to commit an act of penile penetration while fully clothed in a group photograph without its other subjects – including the penetratee – noticing anything was amiss. Which might have suggested to Young’s critics that his comment wasn’t meant to be taken at face value.  

An “apology for anal rape”? Actually mate, however offensive to some the comments were, it was likely something far more routine had happened. He had simply, as many men felt compelled to when issued a laddish witticism, batted the ball carelessly back over the net, barely giving thought to what was said except for the wish to return the serve.

Yet it was, as we have seen, very much a matter of timing. Post MeToo, a whole sensibility, with us for a good thirty years, was being trashed and Young, “pour encourager les autres”, made an ideal victim. Time was being served on the whole era of Nuts and Loaded, of FHM centrespreads and, in all senses, of Men Behaving Badly. It was being served on games of verbal tennis too.

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Five Boxes of Kleenex

The final item in the case against Toby Young was that joke – “tasteless”, “offensive”, “cruel”, “sick”, “callous” – in response to a tweet about how tearful a women felt after watching a segment on Comic Relief about starving children in Africa.

Jane Williams @songbird2407 – “God I’ve gone through about 5 boxes of Kleenex so far…. Jesus….”

Mar 14 2009.

Toby Young @toadmeister – “Me Too, I havn’t [sic] w***** so much in ages.” #ComicRelief

Dawn Butler’s response here seemed to sum up for the rest of her colleagues: “If boasting about masturbating over pictures of dying or starving children” was acceptable, she said, shaking with indignation, “then I have most definitely lost my sense of humour.”

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Whether she ever had one is a moot point. But it’s worth taking a moment to define exactly what a “sense of humour” meant. It didn’t mean, surely, that one was compelled to laugh at jokes which, Young himself would admit, were hardly gold standard. It didn’t even mean you had to smile weakly. Nor did it suggest you had to make jokes yourself.

No: what a sense of humour meant at its basic level, probably, was the ability to sense attempts at humour, to recognise when comments didn’t originate from the dimension of high seriousness. When they came instead from another place where they were not intended to be taken seriously at all. Where they were in fact – whatever Freud said - just a form of play, just jokes.

It wasn’t even a joke Young was wholly responsible for. It had been made in similar form by Rickie Gervais in 2004, in his stand-up show “Politics”. Discussed the film Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s film about the Holocaust, Gervais said that when he’d seen it on the shelves of the video-shop he’d assumed it was a porn film. “Dodgy home movie, you know? German-sounding… They’re the best. And what swung it, it was that quote on the back from Barry Norman: “Have a box of Kleenex ready.” Rubbish! I used about two. There was a shower scene! Shut up!

It would seem, to adapt Young’s sexual harassment document, that a joke deemed funny when made by one, was offensive when made by another.

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Serious and moral human beings did not joke, of course, about wanking over starving children. But was this actually a joke about wanking over starving children at all? Not necessarily – and Young’s attackers, though they denied it, could probably see this too. It was arguably a joke with a moral point, in fact: a raspberry blown at someone emoting too publicly, wanting everyone – including strangers on Twitter – to know how deeply they cared and hoping to enhance themselves in the process. It was, at the very least, rather more complicated than a joke about wanking over starving children. Though in that form, significantly less useful to his opponents.

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But let us be clear, had Young’s enemies understood the true target of this joke, it would have been in no way less offensive to them. Saying the right things in public and exhibiting the right feelings was one of the most devout codes in modern “progressive” politics. Laughing at these shibboleths, refusing to following them, was the ultimate form of contempt.

Whatever, it had to be stopped. And so did Young. For a while it looked like they had succeeded too. Nobody, surely, came back from a pounding like that. Nobody survived the loss of five positions before the eyes of a hostile media. Did they?